Creating Successful Middle School Curriculum Begins with You

By: David C. Virtue, PhD

Western Carolina University

The Association for Middle Level Education (AMLE), the world’s oldest and largest international organization dedicated to the education of young adolescents (i.e., ages 10 – 15), calls for a middle school curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse (Bishop & Harrison, 2021). Such a curriculum:

• Focuses on substantive concepts, skills, and questions and is responsive to students’ readiness, interests, and identities (challenging).
• Invites learners to discover themselves and their world and to envision a fulfilling future for themselves (exploratory).
• Invites students to pursue answers to questions they have about themselves, their communities, and the world and helps them integrate new learning both across domains of content and with their current cognitive frameworks, identities, and aspirations (integrative).
• Embraces and encourages diverse identities, ideas, and viewpoints (diverse).

The forthcoming book, Successful Middle School Curriculum, is a companion to AMLE’s position statement, The Successful Middle School: This We Believe. The book’s aim is to equip readers with a solid grounding in the “what” and “why” of successful middle school curriculum and to empower them to use design thinking to create and implement curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse. This article introduces some of the key ideas in Successful Middle School Curriculum and provides an overview of the curriculum design process.

Teachers Are Curriculum Designers

While much curriculum development today happens in publishing companies, software labs, ministries of education, and education think tanks, the decisive element in the curriculum design process is the individual teacher who implements it. Classroom teachers have a key role in creating curriculum; they have agency in the process, though some may not realize it or feel inclined or empowered to act on it. If you are in an instructional role with young adolescent learners, then YOU are the creative engine that drives middle grades curriculum development. 

Curriculum as a Design Problem

Education consultant and reform advocate Ewan McIntosh characterizes teachers as “curricula makers” (Hepburn, 2023). From this perspective, it is helpful to think of curriculum development as a design problem. Design problems are context-specific problems of practice that are often messy, complex, and ambiguous. Successful Middle School Curriculum portrays curriculum metaphorically as both the map to our students’ future and the vehicle to get them there. Curriculum simultaneously encompasses both outcomes and processes. Thus, the design problem for teachers creating curriculum may be framed as follows: What is the best route (outcome) and vehicle (process) to get diverse students to their learning destination? To solve this problem, middle grades teachers can apply a backward mapping process embedded in design-based research (DBR) to create units that are challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse.

Design-Based Research and Curriculum

DBR is an approach increasingly employed in education that uses methodologies from engineering and applied sciences to develop solutions to practical problems, like curriculum design (Haagen-Schützenhöfer & Hopf, 2020; Scott et al., 2020). The DBR process involves four sets of activities: (1) grounding in the local context, (2) conjecturing solutions, (3) iteratively testing and refining solutions, and (4) reflecting on the outcomes and redesigning solutions (Hoadley & Campos, 2022). When applied to curriculum design, the core of DBR is a reverse logic process, commonly called backward design or backward planning, that follows a three-stage approach formalized by Wiggins and McTighe (1998) in the book Understanding by Design. The process begins with teachers defining the “end,” typically expressed as a learning outcome that may be framed as an essential question or big idea. With the end in mind, teachers determine the assessment evidence that will demonstrate students have achieved the learning outcome. Finally, teachers plan specific lessons and classroom experiences that will help students achieve the learning targets. Curriculum makers continually reflect on the outcomes of design and implementation through the lens of design principles, and they refine and redesign the curriculum model accordingly.

Design Principles for Successful Middle School Curriculum

Design principles help teachers make decisions about the form and function of the curriculum. AMLE’s curriculum vision—challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse—will certainly serve as one set of design principles for successful middle school curriculum.  Public declarations of educational success—such as a graduate profile or “portrait of a graduate”—should also provide design principles for curriculum planning. The Catamount School, Western Carolina University’s laboratory middle school, uses the North Carolina Portrait of a Graduate as a set of design principles. The portrait encompasses seven durable skills that high school graduates should possess to be successful in a 21st century place of work: adaptability, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, empathy, a learner’s mindset, and personal responsibility. Marymount School in Baranquilla, Colombia, created a portrait of a graduate codified in the acronym DEVICES: (D) digital citizens with analytical and communication skills, (E) emotionally intelligent, (V) values-driven leaders oriented toward service, (I) interculturally competent global citizens, (C) creative problem solvers, (E) environmental caretakers, and (S) self-directed and resilient learners. These frameworks provide useful principles for shaping curriculum. Teachers might also derive design principles from school-wide social and emotional learning goals, service-learning expectations, or character education standards.

Conclusion

In successful middle schools, curriculum planning is an interactive process marked by transparency, deliberation, and collaboration. If we think about creating curriculum as a set of design principles and design criteria applied to solve the problem of determining the best route and vehicle to get diverse students to their learning destination, then DBR can provide a helpful approach for teachers to work together in creating a successful middle school curriculum. 

In this article, we’ve explored the value of a design-based approach to curriculum planning using AMLE’s vision as a source of design principles, and we’ve seen how an iterative, backward design process can lead to curriculum that is challenging, exploratory, integrative, and diverse. Every school day in classrooms all around the world, middle grades teachers find ways to connect with their students and to connect their students to the knowledge and skills they need to make sense of the world and establish their place in it. Successful middle school curriculum is not an abstract concept or imagined state of utopia, it is a reality experienced by teachers and students—a reality that needs to be recognized, celebrated, and supported.

Author Note

Dr. David C. Virtue is the Taft B. Botner Distinguished Professor of Middle Grades Education at Western Carolina University. Learn more about the WCU College of Education and Allied Professions at https://www.wcu.edu/learn/departments-schools-colleges/ceap/. To discover more about AMLE’s Successful Middle School framework and Successful Middle School Curriculum, visit www.amle.org.  

References

Bishop, P. A., & Harrison, L. M. (2021). The successful middle school: This we believe. AMLE.

Haagen-Schützenhöfer, C., & Hopf, M. (2020). Design-based research as a model for systematic curriculum development: The example of a curriculum for introductory optics. Physical Review Physics Education Research, 16, 020152. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.16.020152

Hepburn, H. (2023, March13). Teachers are the best curricula makers in the room. Tes Magazine. https://www.tes.com/magazine/analysis/general/teachers-are-best-curricula-makers-room

Hoadley, C., & Campos, F. C. (2022). Design-based research: What it is and why it matters to studying online learning. Educational Psychologist, 57(3), 207–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/00461520.2022.2079128 

Scott, E. E., Wenderoth, M. P., & Doherty, J. H. (2020). Design-based research: A methodology to extend and enrich biology education research. CBE–Life Sciences Education, 19(3), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-11-0245

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (1998). Understanding by design. ASCD.